What Is Tournament Day?

By: Adam Jardy

The Columbus Dispatch - July 29, 2014 04:15 PM

Today was no ordinary day of training for the Crew.

When assistant coach Rob Maaskant bellowed out instructions, even those standing in the parking lot outside of the Crew’s facility in Obetz knew that today was, as Maaskant yelled out, “ Tournament Day!”

What is Tournament Day? According to coach Gregg Berhalter, it’s a day where players compete for individual points within the overall scope of the team. Some sort of team tournament takes place, and members of the winning team each receive a point. Those points add up during the course of the season, and progress is noted on a chart within the Crew locker room.

Tournament Day takes place every so often, and it’s a day players look forward to.

Today saw the Crew go through some six-on-six scrimmaging on short fields. The Crew was divided up into four teams, which played a round-robin tournament before crowning a winner in a championship game.

As Meram said, it was intense.

“I think guys love Tournament Day,” defender Chad Barson said. “We have a team that really likes to battle and compete. You’re constantly aware of where you stand in the table and it translates from practice into games. You’re trying to win a tournament, win a game and this is where you battle and grind it out and figure out how to do that. We love Tournament Day. We know we have tomorrow off, so it’s really a day where we can push. It’s always a battle. Guys want to win.”

This season, Barson said the Crew has had 15 or 16 Tournament days. Both he and Meram said the overall Crew points leader is goalkeeper Steve Clark, whom Barson said has won “maybe 10 out of 16 times.” Defender Eric Gehrig is second, Meram said, while Barson said he’s somewhere in the top third of the roster.

“Everyone takes it extremely serious,” Meram said. “I was second for a while but now I’m falling off and I’m (ticked). I think I’m three or four points behind Steve and then two points behind Eric, so that really bugs me. I’ve got to pick it up. My play has been shaky during Tournament Day.”< /p>

The Crew has Wednesday off, which meant Berhalter could push his players a little bit more today.

“I think it’s nice to get the guys competing,” he said. “What we do is about competition, what we do is about performing and I think it’s nice ot see in training who can come to terms with that and be successful.”